This was kind of my thought... the system has been designed so heavily toward this paradigm it would require a major rework of not only this process but many other processes in the system, and its not my system. I'm working on a deadline and the people I am passing it off to need to be able to maintain it.

I would love to shove this off into a database, cuz I love databases, but unfortunately I don't see this as being the way to go.

The thing I am playing with right now is preprocessing all the holdings files ahead of time and then traversing the shell once, populating all the reports in one big hit... I think it will probably yield the most favorable results without completely disrupting their entire system.